Cleveland’s latest effort to protect students traveling to and from school adds workers outside primary schools to watch over thousands of children as they adjust to new routes to class following a sweeping round of school closures.
But the city and Cleveland Metropolitan School District have disclosed fewer details on this push than they have during past initiatives that deployed mediators to tamp down violence or neighborhood altercations involving students.
A city spokesperson, Joseph Postwaite, would not identify all organizations participating or say where workers are assigned, citing safety concerns — though some of the new workers publicly posted their locations on the first day of school.
At least 16 “credible messengers” are part of this year’s effort. They will work mainly outside K-8 schools during arrival and dismissal, in some cases alongside veteran violence interrupters and staff from public agencies. In the past, that work was mostly concentrated at the high school level.
The new arrangement is broader — and harder to define — than the district’s past program, known as the “Safe Passage Project.” Though that initiative evolved over the years, beginning in 2023, it focused on conflict mediation at high schools. It also publicly identified the schools and partner nonprofits that provided the known “violence interrupters” staffing the program’s day-to-day work.
What is in place now is not managed or coordinated by a single nonprofit or city agency; instead, it includes people managed through a patchwork of public agencies, nonprofits and grants. The city did not provide enough information to show precisely who is responsible for each part of the work at K-8 schools and high schools.
Postwaite, for example, declined to share the full list of nonprofits that will put individuals along students’ routes to school, saying the city is keeping that “close to the chest,” for now. Instead he wrote to Signal Cleveland in an email that safe passage is “one component of a broader, coordinated network of support for students.” That network includes multiple city agencies, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, the Cleveland Public Library and several community organizations.
Last year, CEO Warren Morgan and Mayor Justin Bibb vowed there would be a coordinated effort between many of those same agencies to keep the thousands of students traveling to new schools safe. In addition to those efforts, Morgan promised a revamp of past safe passage efforts, noting that the expanded funding for violence interrupters had sunset in 2025.
This school year, CMSD has referred most questions about the program to the city. The city has identified some, but not all, of the organizations who will employ safe passage workers. They include the Institute for Research for Social Justice and Action (IRSJA), a national nonprofit that has worked in cities like Newark and Birmingham, Alabama.
That group, which started working in Cleveland this year, trained the 16 “junior credible messengers” who will be stationed mainly outside of K-8 schools at arrival and dismissal time. IRSJA’s safe passage work, Postwaite said, is funded via a $500,000 grant from the Neighborhood Safety Fund, which was seeded with $10 million in public pandemic relief money but is managed and distributed by the Cleveland Foundation. (Signal Cleveland gets support from the Cleveland Foundation.)
IRJSA has not signed a formal contract with the city or school district to do violence prevention or safety work with students. But all individuals who interact with students have undergone the CMSD background check process, Jon Benedict, a spokesperson for CMSD, told Signal Cleveland.
Benedict also noted that the district’s decision to not publicly announce the schools receiving safe passage help is in part because mediators might be redeployed based on safety needs rather than assigned to a particular school.
The 16 credible messengers will be paired with “seasoned violence interrupters,” some of whom might work with organizations such as the city’s Community Relations Board and Renounce Denounce, which also got a grant from the Neighborhood Safety Fund, Postwaite told Signal Cleveland.
Those two groups could also provide violence interrupters in and around high schools. Signal Cleveland reached out to Renounce Denounce but did not hear back before publication.
Despite the city’s insistence that there were safety implications to sharing details of the work, IRSJA staff reposted posts on social media on the first day of school highlighting the work and locations of some of their credible messengers.
“10 weeks of training that lead up to the first day of school,” read the caption of one post featuring a montage of smiling workers in neon yellow vests standing outside of district elementary schools.
